Religious education and curriculum making in comparative perspective: exploring Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence and the Curriculum for Wales

Abstract Scholarship on Religious Education (RE) has increasingly paid attention to curriculum making, comparative research and international knowledge transfer. This article engages with these themes by offering the first extended comparative exploration of Religious and Moral Education (RME) in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) and Religion, Values and Ethics (RVE) in the Curriculum for Wales (CfW). By analysing a range of sources from both countries and drawing on a curriculum making framework attentive to supranational, macro, meso, and micro levels, the article examines curriculum as text and as practice. The article examines areas of connection and divergence across different sites of curriculum making and concludes that curriculum making at various sites can both heighten and mitigate the marginalisation of RE.